It sure has been an exciting 2 months! Since June, more than 1,000 developers, programmers and hackers from all over the globe have been working on creative solutions to submit for the first-ever global virtual TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon.

As a refresher, Visa joined the fun by adding a special contest and prize. We challenged developers to submit a game-changer – a new creative way to improve the payment experience for anyone, anywhere.

Developers did not disappoint. 22 teams submitted to “Disrupt Commerce” hoping to land in the top three spots. It wasn’t easy narrowing it down, there were so many impressive hacks. But…(drum roll)…here they are:

1st PLACE –“Blindsight:Virtual Eyes Through Haptic Feedback”

Prize: $8,000 and Innovator Passes to the SF Disrupt Conference

A wearable device with the potential to greatly increase the independence of the blind. Blindsight is an armband and smartphone app combination, designed to help the visually impaired by integrating machine learning with haptic feedback. Blindsight is capable of sending and receiving payments through the Visa API integration. The relevant Visa APIs allow for finding ATMs and merchants that accept VISA, along with a credit card fraud prevention and mobile payment solution.

Watch their demo here and stay tuned, next week we’ll have a Q&A with the team on how they created this hack!

Blindsight also landed a spot as a semi-finalist Virtual Hackathon team, that will demo their product at Disrupt SF 2018!

2nd PLACE - “AI Vision for SMB”

Prize - $5,000 and Innovator Passes to the SF Disrupt Conference

This AI vision kit can be used to count items, includes multiple cameras on a single unit to track multiple things and uses a data storage solution for small businesses. Its purpose is to provide a deeper analysis using the computer vision data that can help business owners to make decisions. It can provide insights on how busy a physical store is, matched to the revenue that it is generating, along with insights to the wait time of similar stores through Visa Queue Insights. Plus, it is meant to track inventory through the same computer vision.